Save my Soul to Survive the Devil

I’m not a huge fan of Strategy RPGs. Being a bit of a perfectionist, the permanent death in games like Fire Emblem causes me to do a lot of restarting. Tough battles like the Wiegraf fight in Final Fantasy Tactics quickly turn me off of the game because if you didn’t keep an extra save and are unable to progress, you are effectively stuck.

Then along came a little game by Atlus.

Devil Survivor still has some miles to go before I can declare my hatred for Strategy RPGs at an end, but so far so good. It has avoided several pitfalls that tend to tick me off about SRPGs.

First, no permanent death. Lord, is nothing more annoying. If it were that the game was designed where you cannot just reload anyway, or that you get such an ample supply of characters of all different types, then permanent death may not bother me. Alas, this tends to not be the case and while I may do some hardcore crazy things, replaying a map 20 times to have everyone survive is not one of them.

As of now there have been no crazy amounts of reinforcements. Yes, I am early, but somehow I get the feeling that’s not exactly something this game will be sporting. Hopefully, I will be right, or at least wrong in a very small sense. I can deal with some of it, but if it starts to get to the point where every battle throws in as many enemies as you started with half-way through the fight, I may start having issues.

And one thing that I’m not sure is thought of too often, the balance of enemies to map size has been very good so far. This means, I’m not spending massive amounts of time just moving and I am not so swarmed that I can barely control what is going on. This also could change as the game goes on, but right now it feels like they got a handle on it.

There is also a lot of talking in this game. A lot. And a lot of times you get your chance to respond, but I’m not quite sure if there is any reason for this, ut again we’ll find out.

As of now, good things are coming my way, I feel.